Voyager I

[Tenet Nosce]

The means we use to understand our experience is completely inseperable from our experience. Is that not obvious?

I suppose we think it is obvious. Some others believe that our technologies enable us to obtain objective information about our universe. Certain branches of empiricism go so far as to believe that sensory experience is an entirely unreliable means of gaining knowledge, but at the same time believe that technological extensions of our senses extremely reliable.

The scientific method, for example, asserts that knowledge may only be obtained through empirical observations by our senses, or technological extensions of them. Thus, it intrinsically denies that nonrational modes of thought, like intuition, can lead us to knowledge. Since intuition cannot be empirically validated, and reliably reproduced in an experimental setting, it is discredited. And according to some, it doesn't even exist at all.

Go figure.

But anyway, the notion which I am trying to get at is that technological achievements are an outer representation of denied inner abilities. For example, telephone/radio represents clairaudience, television represents clairvoyance, and the Internet represents telepathy.

The general view is that these experiences are dependent upon technology (ie particular rearrangements of 1D entities in time/space), and would not be otherwise be accessible to our consciousness.

According to my view, the fact that these technologies exist means it should be obvious that consciousness has the capacity to experience these things independent of technology. But again, to most, it is not obvious at all. And to some, it is absurd to even assert that they exist, since we cannot prove them (as of yet) via empirical methods.

BTW, by saying "pet theory" I didn't mean to imply that it was an original idea. Jose Arguelles wrote about it extensively in Time and the Technophere. (Not that I agree with everything he wrote.)

Of course, these ideas didn't originate with him either. They're very old.